Faster drives make faster RAID?

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Megalomaniac

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yep, im back with more fairly stupid question... :rolleyes:

so if a drive is fast on tis own merits, does that automatically translate into a faster RAID 5 array?
Yes for RAID 1 and 0, but what about 5?

setup to be:
RAID 5 array (leaning towards 7200.10 320 gig drives, 5 of them, or 4 WD500YS)
This will be using the Intel 965 controller probably on the new Gigabyte board (the one with 9 Sata ports)

Since this RAID will use the CPU to compute parity..

Edit: scratch the 7200.10 they seem to be loud, need to find a 320 or 400 drive that is actually quiet.
 
I've read that the 7200.10 320's are quiet, but maybe im wrong.
I would tend to think that faster drives would translate to a faster array, yes. However, when writing I think that your speed will depend heavilly on the CPU/RAM and their interconnect speed, since you say that parity will be placed on the CPU.

In a nut shell, when reading from your array, I *think* that faster drives = faster access.
When *writing* faster drives would mean faster writes, in the CPU does not get bogged down.
 
hardware AMD intel dell ATi nvidia asus seagate samsung xeon compaq

well, I have read that some drives that were generally considered to be "fast" were abysmal in R-5 configurations. There's a thread on SR about some Seagate drive that required a firmware update in order to perform well in a R-5 environment.
 
rather than make a new thread, ill ask here. can any of you recommend a good raid card with raid5 support?
 
Megalomaniac said:
Areca makes good raid cards...
and the bst drives seem to be the WD YR series with TLER..
Click to expand...
I agree on Areca. However, the only way WD RE drives are the best are compared to other WD drives :p Almost anything else out there would be my choice. Maxtor, Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi, all better choices IMO.

 
well heres something interesting courtesy of the folks over at SR

check it out you would be 7200.10 buyers...
http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=22660&st=125
(at the bottom)

p.s. also tristan792 , that link has a benchie with a guy running a good RAID card.
p.p.s. u_m, i thought TLER was supposed to help the drives out in RAID configs (also, i will rate WD above Maxtor drives any day of the week)
 
thanks to all of you that replied with information to my question. the 1230 from the previous link is quite an expensive card(700+). i had looked at some on newegg earlier (ones made by areca) and they all seem to have a fairly hefty price tag. im not too sure i want to spend that much, but you never know i guess. between the drives and the card this could come out to a good amount of money.
 
Thats why personally, I am going to have a dedicated PIII system, loaded up with ram and regular sata controllers and I am going to make a software raid. I'm thinking of it as a stepping stone.
 
Cheap RAID cards are a bad idea and cause a lot of trouble

If you don't run windows or can run some Windows server version then software raid (not onboard sata raid) is better than cheap controllers, by far.

Even if you can't get software raid-5 in your OS of choice, I'd rather run raid-10 software RAID (not SATA onboard pseudo-raid) than raid-5 on a cheap controller. The loss of drive space is easily caught by not buying the two controllers.

Faster drives should always be a priority. RAID speedup can be unpredictable, faster drives are always nice to have.
 
You have a good point, but it appears that many people have had ok results with the Highpoint 2320 controller. Then again, it may be "since I spent $250 on a controller, it'd better be working nicely"....
 
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